It was a fiery PMQs today, with Kemi Badenoch on punchy form, pummelling Starmer for his recent failures and telling him at one point that his own MPs report Labour being called “the paedo defenders party”. Isabel Hardman in the Spectator has the details.

Badenoch’s tail was up this lunchtime because she felt she had been leading the debate on student loans. Describing them as a “debt trap”, she said “it is time for all of us to do something about it” and asked whether the Prime Minister would cut the interest on the loans.

Starmer responded that he was “glad to hear that the Leader of the Opposition has finally admitted that they scammed the country on this, and that applies to everything they did in government”. He added that this Government had “inherited their broken student loans system” and would “look at other ways to make it fairer”. He then trumpeted this morning’s news on falling energy bills and took credit for that, saying: “We promised to cut the cost of living, we are cutting the cost of living.”

Badenoch replied that energy bills were still higher than when Labour came into office. She then pointed out that her party was under new leadership, and that many Labour MPs wished that theirs was too. She didn’t say this, but those Labour MPs also feel that the continued reliance of the Prime Minister on blaming the last Tory government is no longer washing with the public, who feel Starmer should have made more headway and showed far more authority by now.

Badenoch was also pretty vicious when Starmer tried his regular joke about Conservatives defecting to Reform: she told him that his party was smaller now too, and that in one case this was because a Labour MP had been arrested on suspicion of child sex offences. No wonder, she told him, to audible gasps, some Labour MPs have been reporting being called “the paedo defenders party”. She was, she added, only repeating what Labour MPs had said, something that has been picked up in vox pops carried out by broadcasters in Gorton and Denton.

Read More: Kemi Tells Starmer He is Leading “The Paedo Defenders Party”